Comments by "disgruntledtoons" (@disgruntledtoons) on "The WORST Way to Develop Software" video.

  1. In a meeting I mentioned having begun to code a change for a project. My supervisor said that I should have completed the design before starting to code. My response was, "But that's how I find out whether my design is any good." Managers who plan in the waterfall paradigm are also notoriously resistant to refactoring code. In the waterfall paradigm, the entire application must be rewritten and tested before any of the modified code can be deployed, and so this creates the illusion of a massive undertaking with enormous costs. And when they can be persuaded to approve the rewrite, or are ordered to do so from above, they insist on making it a big project, handled by a separate team, which is forever playing catch-up with the team that is making improvements to the application. And waterfall makes maintenance development more difficult and expensive, because a bad design decision can never be fixed, because, again, nothing can move forward until everything is ready to move forward. So developers struggle for years with an application with major design flaws, because fixing the bad design is always deemed too risky.
    1